Vendor Management Lead

Centific; Remote; MYR 100,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading AI data foundry in Malaysia is looking for a Vendor Management Lead to oversee vendor recruitment and manage relationships with service providers. In this role, you'll be responsible for driving talent attraction campaigns, assessing vendor suitability, and negotiating contracts. Strong management experience and the ability to work US time zone hours are essential. This position offers a unique opportunity to engage with diverse service providers in the AI and language services sector.

Qualifications

• Management experience is required.
• Experience in end-to-end recruitment processes.
• Proven ability to work in a flexible, remote environment.

Responsibilities

• Maintain and manage a pool of global service providers.
• Drive end-to-end recruitment cycle from sourcing to onboarding.
• Negotiate vendor contracts and rate cards.

Skills

Vendor management

Talent attraction

Negotiation

Relationship building

Language services

Job description

About the Company

Centific is a frontier AI data foundry that curates diverse, high-quality data, using our purpose-built technology platforms to empower the Magnificent Seven and our enterprise clients with safe, scalable AI deployment. Our team includes more than 150 PhDs and data scientists, along with more than 4,000 AI practitioners and engineers. We harness the power of an integrated solution ecosystem—comprising industry-leading partnerships and 1.8 million vertical domain experts in more than 230 markets—to create contextual, multilingual, pre-trained datasets; fine-tuned, industry-specific LLMs; and RAG pipelines supported by vector databases. Our zero-distance innovation™ solutions for GenAI can reduce GenAI costs by up to 80% and bring solutions to market 50% faster.

Our mission is to bridge the gap between AI creators and industry leaders by bringing best practices in GenAI to unicorn innovators and enterprise customers. We aim to help these organizations unlock significant business value by deploying GenAI at scale, helping to ensure they stay at the forefront of technological advancement and maintain a competitive edge in their respective markets.

About the Job

Overview
The Vendor Management Lead is responsible for working with the pool of vendors. They drive vendor recruitment and run talent attraction campaigns. The Vendor Management Lead will manage the qualification process with eligible vendors to determine suitability to particular projects. Some management experience required. The Vendor Management Lead will be required to work US time zone hours.

Principal Duties and Responsibilities

• Maintaining and increasing the pool of global service providers, both freelance individuals and agencies for Language and AI services.
• Looking for suitable collaborators to Centific’s range of services including but not limited to translation, editing, proofreading, machine translation post-editing, language quality assessment, Data labelling, annotation, LLM authoring etc.
• Driving end-to-end recruitment cycle: sourcing, screening, negotiation, and onboarding.
• Running innovative talent attraction campaigns and maximizing all channels with a special focus on social media.
• Processing candidates’ information and assessing their suitability according to our requirements and the specifics of the given accounts.
• Managing translation tests with eligible candidates.
• Managing the negotiation of vendor contracts and rate cards in line with Centific’s scheme and specific projects or accounts.
• Processing and archiving NDAs, MSAs, and other collaboration agreements.
• Recording approved candidates in the vendor database.
• Supporting delivery teams in the communication with resources such as checking availability or chasing for responses.
• Building up language teams for new projects, languages and/or new accounts.
• Negotiating additional rates and discounts when required.
• Building strong relationships with language service providers to keep them engaged and committed to the company.
• Keeping the resource database updated.
• Acting as a point of escalation for collaboration issues or conflicts with vendors.
• Consistently working towards improving tools, technologies, and processes.
• Additional duties as required.

Centific is an equal‑opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, age, mental or physical disability, medical condition, sex (including pregnancy), gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, marital status, familial status, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements.